Saturday, October 4, 2008

Vegan MoFo Day 4: CARAMEL!

Okay, so, I need to deviate slightly from my plan of discovering lazy yet nutritious vegan foods for a couple of minutes here. A couple of weeks ago, I was tipped off on this vegan caramel recipe by someone who probably wants me dead* via the world's happiest death... death by vegan caramel. Mmm. Caramel.

I haven't had corn syrup in house for about a billion years, and I realized that I was out of white sugar just as I started making the caramels, so I just subbed in light agave nectar and brown sugar. Also, I doubled the salt (mmm salty caramels) and decreased the EB by a tablespoon in order to try to avoid the oil on top that the original poster mentions. And then I doubled the whole recipe. So, summing that up, I actually used:

I followed the same method as the original poster, mixing everything but the EB and vanilla together over medium heat, then adding the EB and mixing until it melted, then leaving the whole thing alone until it hit 243, then stirring in the vanilla and pouring the mix out to cool on parchment paper.

It's been about forty minutes since I set the caramel out to cool, and it doesn't seem to be hardening too much. Dude, I totally tested for the soft ball stage! It was making soft balls! But I think I should've gone a little bit higher... it's too mushy to cut still. I stuck a test piece into the freezer to see if it'll get hard enough to cut without getting weird that way.

Even if it doesn't harden, I am PSYCHED. It tastes one hundred percent like caramel. To my pleasant surprise, it actually has no detectable coconut flavor. It just tastes like rich, sweet, buttery caramel.

It is so freaking good.

I really need it to harden so that I can wrap it up and put it away before I gorge myself silly on it and all of my teeth fall out and I go into like hypoglycemic shock. Vegan caramel may be my new arch nemesis... sweet, sweet nemesis.

*I have reactive hypoglycemia, which is sort of like backwards diabetes in that high GI foods make my blood sugar drop drastically instead of making it rise drastically. Functionally, I have to avoid more or less the same foods as diabetics do.